When writing fiction, there’s a couple of things you’ve gotta bear in mind:
Unless you’re doing the old-timey Omniscient Narrator thing, almost all scenes will have an implied viewpoint character.
The word count you devote to describing things implies where the viewpoint character’s focus of attention is.
It really doesn’t take much. The exact thresholds are going to depend on what you’re describing and how verbose your writing is overall, of course, but in general:
If you spend three words describing something, your viewpoint character took notice.
If you spend five words describing something, your viewpoint character did a double take.
If you spend seven words describing something, your viewpoint character stopped and stared.
So the moral is: if you can’t figure out why your readers are telling you that your protagonist reads as hella gay, it’s probably because - according to your descriptive word count - she’s constantly stopping and staring at other ladies’ breasts. Get those adjectives under control!
mind if your omniscient narrator is ogling people’s chests that’s also…a bit odd there is probably context that can make it less odd but only in a broader environment of oddness (via @mumblingsage)
Omniscient narrators very often have distinct voices and strong opinions about what’s going on. (Lemony Snicket, anyone?) Folks tend to get the third-person omniscient confused with the third-person objective; the latter is the one that lacks a distinct voice and merely reports factual observations.
Which means that yes, an omniscient narrator could totally ogle people’s chests. An omniscient narrator could ogle all the chests.
This collection of posts is the perfect combination of helpful advice and humour.
